Synopsis

This new deluxe eBook edition features more than seventy-five additional pages of exclusive, author-approved annotations throughout the text, which contain new illustrations and photographs, to enrich your reading experience. You can access the eBook annotations with a simple click or tap on your eReader via the convenient links. Access them as you read the novel or as supplemental material after finishing the entire story. There is also Random House Reader’s Circle bonus content, which is sure to inspire discussion at book clubs everywhere.

Experience the story of three unforgettable women—and the friendships that unfold at a pivotal moment in history.“A powerful, haunting, deeply ambitious novel about love and war, impeccably executed, impossible to put down.”—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Cleopatra: A Life It’s 1941. Babe throws like a boy, thinks for herself, and never expects to escape the poor section of her quiet Massachusetts town. Then World War II breaks out, and everything changes. Her friend Grace, married to a reporter on the local paper, fears being left alone with her infant daughter when her husband ships out; Millie, the third member of their childhood trio, now weds the boy who always refused to settle down; and Babe wonders if she should marry Claude, who even as a child could never harm a living thing. As the war rages abroad, life on the home front undergoes its own battles and victories; and when the men return, and civilian life resumes, nothing can go back to quite the way it was. Along the way, the women will learn what it means to be a wife, a mother, a friend, a fighter, and a survivor. Beautiful, startling, and heartbreaking, Next to Love is a love letter to the brave women who shaped a nation’s destiny.“Haunting and profoundly moving . . . [Ellen] Feldman’s characters live and love with breathtaking intensity.”—Booklist (starred review)“An intimate look at how we can be dismantled and rebuilt by changing times.”—O: The Oprah Magazine“A deftly revealing . . . portrait of the changing face of America . . . heartbreaking reality.”—Marie Claire“An honest American experience of the aftermath of World War II rendered in sharp detail and full of pathos, Next to Love tells us what we hate to acknowledge—that personal battles don’t end with the armistice.”—Susan Vreeland, author of Clara and Mr. Tiffany